Day 82 (Feedback Friday): Portfolio Rebalancer by Michael Lynch

Portfolio Rebalancer

I user tested Portfolio Rebalancer by Michael Lynch today, and it’s awesome. This is a great SLC (simple, lovable, complete) product that I can see easily expanding into a complete suite of tools to help people manage their investments.

I’m a target user for this as I use a 3-fund portfolio and have built a spreadsheet to help me rebalance my portfolio, but perhaps that might mean that my feedback is not as useful because I’m almost too familiar with this process. I imagine a tool like this would be most compelling to people who are starting to dive into the Boglehead three-fund portfolio / index funds and either don’t know how to or don’t want to calculate their asset allocation and rebalancing themselves.

Notes from after recording the video:

Refreshing the page reset all of the data I entered and I expected it to remember what I put
- I’m guessing Michael is going to build a login system to persist data
- Maybe he also wants to avoid people using public computers and having their financial data accidentally stick around because that’s bad news bears
The rebalancer helps me rebalance between asset classes that I currently have, but it doesn’t provide support if I try to introduce new asset classes. For example, if I clear my holdings and put in $10,000 of VTSAX, I don’t have any options available to me even though it seems useful to be able to say that I want to introduce int’l stocks or bonds into my portfolio
- Using VTSAX, VTIAX, and VBTLX (and their non-Admiral equivalents) as default choices seems like a reasonable way to do this

Portfolio Rebalancer

Meta